Review of "Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction" by P. H. Matthews (RIP)
The book is clearly written by a person with a very high verbal IQ. However, the book lives up to its name (“very short”), so I ended up learning almost nothing from it -too much content is attempted to be stuffed in too few pages. Perhaps the most interesting pages were those on “Sounds”, which explain the difficulty of determining pronunciation simply from an understanding of alphabetic concepts. Since the book is so short, so is the review.
Rating: three out of five stars.